Showing titles in Labor & Industrial Relations

The year was 1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous - the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls. As the years passed, the women began to suffer from mysterious and crippling illnesses.

2015 saw the worst American maritime disaster in decades. The captain of the SS El Faro commanded his crew to sail straight into a hurricane. The ship sank and all 33 crew members died. The sinking raised troubling questions: Why did the captain choose to sail into the hurricane? Why did no one on board or on shore stop him? And why was such an old and heavily loaded ship even allowed on the water? The crew of the SS El Faro is gone, but their haunting final hours were preserved by the ship’s black box.

Nevin Shetty's powerful and skillfully woven debut, Second Chance Economics, makes a data-driven case for a new economic engine, as told through the crisis of mass incarceration and the millions of underemployed justice-impacted Americans. In the United States, an astounding 77 million Americans have a criminal record. It is a systemic crisis with profound economic consequences, creating lifelong collateral consequences not only for individuals but for the national economy.

The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America. This program is read by award-winning narrator André Santana. In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming reality: crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their...

For fans of Bernie Sanders and Thomas Piketty, an urgent intervention against capitalism revealing how economic models serve the extremely wealthy and powerful at the expense of ordinary people—and how we can reclaim our power to make choices about our economic lives. Capitalism isn’t...

A brief look at the background of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the relation of race and class in the American labor movement.

In this classic account, historian Philip Foner traces the radical history of black workers’ contribution to the American labor movement.

 Blood Runs Coal comes at a time of resurgent labor movements in the United States and the current administration's attempts to bolster the fossil-fuel industry. Brilliantly researched and compellingly written, it sheds light on the far-reaching effects of industrial and socioeconomic change that unfold across America to this day. 

A leader of the Starbucks and Tesla union movements shares stories from the front lines to help us organize our own workplaces and “better understand the aims and goals for a resurgent trade union movement and how workers all over the country can join in solidarity with it” (Senator Bernie...

In a devastating and urgent work of investigative journalism, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hamby uncovers the tragic resurgence of black lung disease in Appalachia, its Big Coal cover-up, and the resilient mining communities who refuse to back down. Decades ago, a grassroots uprising forced...

Business Execution doesn’t need more training, it needs better systems Most businesses are struggling with leadership and performance. A few are breaking away from the pack by bringing a new dimension to their leadership, a groundbreaking new concept known as Process Intelligence (PQ). Building leadership systems through Process Intelligence, adding it to traditional IQ and EQ, is enabling leaders to build sustainable, scalable, high-performing organizations with significant bottom-line improvements. Through multiple case studies developed over decades, and real-world, step-by-step ...

Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the "kill floors" of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of America's most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society's most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today, most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy - particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America's cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.

In The Problem with Work, Kathi Weeks boldly challenges the presupposition that work, or waged labor, is inherently a social and political good. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation.

The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means, we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world and what we choose not to bring into the world.

Richard Rashke leads us through the myriad of charges and countercharges, theories and facts, and reaches conclusions based solely on the evidence in hand. Originally published in 1981, his audiobook offers a vivid, edgy picture of the tensions that racked this country in the 1970s. However, the volume is not only an important historical document. Complex, fascinating characters populate this compelling insider's view of the nuclear industry.

Praised for its "impressive even-handedness", From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend has set the standard for viewing American history through the prism of working people (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

In this, the first broad historical overview of labor in the United States in 20 years, Philip Nicholson examines anew the questions, the villains, the heroes, and the issues of work in America. Unlike recent books that have covered labor in the 20th century, Labor's Story in the United States looks at the broad landscape of labor since before the Revolution. Throughout, the audiobook focuses on the integral relationship between the strength of labor and the growth of democracy, painting a vivid picture of the strength of labor movements.

The experiments of both Capitalism and Communism are almost complete, and they both lead to one big organization controlling everything you do. In 1925, when this book was first published, it was true, and it is even truer today.

An expansive and accessible account of anarchism as a theory of practice.